At Gen Con 2024, the new game Landmarks seemed to pop up in the text chain with my gaming groups more than almost every other game during the weekend. The publisher of Landmarks, Floodgate Games (makers of hits such as Sagrada, Décorum, and Skyrockets), had a big party to kick off Gen Con with a special sale on Landmarks, and demo tables featuring the game were full constantly during the show.

The Floodgate team gave me the impression that Landmarks stood as the single biggest item Floodgate has ever distributed at a convention, in terms of unit sales.

So, we can start there: no matter what I think about the game, Landmarks made a major splash. I did a demo then got the game to the table during a recent family beach trip, and for the audiences I forced to the table (mostly a mix of casual gamers, ranging from ages 9 to 79), Landmarks is a good fit as a Codenames-adjacent word association experience that plays in about 20 minutes depending on player count.

The big takeaway from my five plays during beach week? Landmarks is a lot of fun with my family—as long as I don’t bring too many players!

Treasure Hunt

Landmarks…

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Don’t tell my erudite friends but skirmish games, in particular, Star Wars: Imperial Assault, got me back into board gaming (even though I find the entirety of the modern Star Wars franchise unbearably boring). I love pushing miniatures around on a grid of some kind and making them shoot each other.

Now, I do love Star Trek, the show about people solving problems with talking, and I’m happy to say that if you’re looking for a highly approachable two-player skirmish game, Star Trek: Away Missions fits the bill. While the way you win can feel slightly disjointed as a game, it often ends up feeling more in the spirit of a Star Trek set piece, where a character has to perform some jargon-filled objective while dodging phaser fire.

Yellow Alert

Away Missions has you selecting your team from amongst Romulans, Klingons, Borg, and Federation factions. For this review, I had access to the starter kits for each. As I understand it, you can get other collections of minis which add characters you can swap in, more cards to build your decks with, and additional options for objectives.

You have a deck of Support Cards, and a deck of Mission Cards. The former contain various pieces of equipment that you…

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Back in high school, countless lunch hours were spent huddling around our oblong tables with piles of playing cards as we repeatedly pounded the playing surface over and over again. Slapjack may be an early iteration of slapping card games, but it paved the way for a genre that gave us the magic of Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza. Now, other companies seek to emulate that game's success, with one of the latest being Cool Cool Cool, designed by Keith Baker and Jennifer Ellis of Twogether Studios.

Cool Cool Cool Overview

If you've played any slapping games in the past, you'll find plenty of familiarity with Cool Cool Cool. After evenly distributing the cards between all players, each person takes a turn flipping their top card over into the center of the table to form a communal pile, saying the name of the card in the process. If one of the active rules is triggered by this card, players try to be the first to slap the stack and collect all of the cards played in the round thus far.

The gimmick in this game, however, is that there are eight rules cards that will change the slapping conditions. For example, the base game plays with Pairs, Panini, and The Name of the Game. Pairs would mean that…

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Nothing out there explores this theme quite like the worldwide sensation The Walking Dead (TWD). For the most part, the world of TWD follows a single group of Survivors, led by Rick Grimes, as they try to find their way in a world that’s hardly recognizable. And, while it initially seems the thing to fear is the titular walking dead, they soon discover that the real terror is other people.

TWD first arrived on the scene as a comic book in 2003. Written by Robert Kirkman, the series’ themes and rabid fan base eventually attracted the attention of the AMC television network who turned it into one of the most popular shows in the history of television. It ran for a total of eleven seasons over a period of twelve years and has spawned a number of spinoff series. While the core television show, and the comic books, have come to an end, it’s clear that The Walking Dead isn’t going anywhere.

From low effort tie-ins such as TWD Monopoly and TWD Jenga to more nuanced efforts such as TWD: Something to Fear, it…

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I know that not everyone loves dice chuckers, but there’s something satisfying about grabbing a handful of dice and rolling them across the table. Particularly when those dice influence the actions of 500 foot tall monsters duking it out in a major metropolitan area; like in 2011’s King of Tokyo. The series has had a slew of releases over the years: from “monster packs” (promo cards featuring new monsters), to brand new titles like King of New York, and even a reimagining of the original in 2024’s King of Tokyo: Origins. But the game has been largely the same since the original was released: 2-6 players going head to head trying to come out on top. But now with the release of King of Monster Island, the series has gone coop, with players all trying to defeat a fire monster born from the depths of a volcano on an island in the middle of the Pacific.

Way to set the stage!

King of Monster Island Overview

The first thing you’ll notice when sitting down to play is the enormous volcano in the center of the player board. Cleverly assembled from cardboard and plastic, this is not only the centerpiece of the game, but also acts as a…

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The connection between board game design and intellectual properties is frequently superficial. The typical approach for such games is to create a generic board game system that can accommodate a variety of themes and then gradually introduce rules to give the illusion of capturing the essence of those IPs. It is uncommon to encounter a game where the IP takes point, and the game designer is trying their utmost to ensure that the rules serve the franchise effectively.

Fortunately, The Thing Boardgame is on the other side of this situation. This is one of the few games where every line of rule makes sense in context while still offering a plateful of systems that one would expect in a well-designed cooperative game. But before I chirp about my praises and concerns, you should probably get to know the game first.

The Thing Boardgame is based on the 1982 film of the same name by John Carpenter. The film, proudly sitting on the horror sci-fi throne, is about a shape-shifting alien life form that can spread like a virus and takes place in a research station in Antarctica. At the start of the game, one of the players starts out as an infected Alien player.

Now, if this sounds like a social deduction game, you are one-third correct. Social deduction…

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I lead employee engagement for a food & beverage manufacturer when I’m not here talking games. At a recent lunch event, I decided to bring some of the games from my personal collection to the office to spur some laughs while we did yet another round of bland lunch catering.

I put my copy of Just One (2018, Repos Production) at one table, then waited to see if anyone would engage with it. I was pleasantly surprised to see members of our HR department sit at the table, read the short list of instructions, and dive right in.

Within seconds, you could see the magic beginning to form. Players used the (admittedly terrible) dry erase markers to begin following the game’s simple rules, putting one player in the hot seat while all other players used their easel to come up with a clue that hopefully no other player wrote on their dry erase easel.

When the HR team members not currently in the hot seat showed their words to each other, the usual amounts of surprise, cursing, and accusatory gestures took place. Left with only a word or two to come up with the answer, it was great to see the active player struggle to come up with the right word…and when they did, it was high fives…

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King of Tokyo: Origins is a dice-chucking game that pits monster against monster in the age-old battle for Japan’s biggest city. The winner will either be the first person who reaches 20 points, or be the last monster standing.

Set Up

All players take a cut-out of a monster and sets it in the plastic stand. They then take the accompanying monster’s score tracker, setting the wheel in the upper left (Points) to zero and the wheel in the lower right (Health) to 10. 

[caption id="attachment_295759" align="aligncenter" width="500"] King of Tokyo: Origins[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_295760" align="aligncenter" width="498"] Mechamster and Cosmic Joe[/caption]

Set the board on the table in reach of all players—or don’t. The board only has a circle for the attacking monster to stand in. That’s all. Simply placing your monster in the middle of the table will have the same effect.

Shuffle the deck of cards. Throughout the game, you’ll be able to purchase these to gain either a temporary or permanent bonus. Place three cards face-up and the remaining cards to the side.

[caption id="attachment_295762" align="aligncenter" width="500"] A sampling of cards[/caption]

Randomly choose a starting player and…

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Return to the beleaguered city of Tokyo—now with the addition of Tokyo Bay—as our monsters slug it out once again for domination and to claim victory. 

If you’re new to King of Tokyo, I went over the setup and gameplay in my recent review of King of Tokyo: Origins. (Known from here as KoT: O) That game comes with four monsters, each lacking in special abilities and rendering them disappointingly interchangeable. King of Tokyo: Monster Box (KoT: MB), a fully stand-alone game, solves that problem in a big way. 

Let’s start with some of the basics, though. 

[caption id="attachment_295770" align="aligncenter" width="500"] King of Tokyo Monster Box box[/caption]

KoT:MB comes with its own big deck of monster cards. 

[caption id="attachment_295771" align="aligncenter" width="500"] A sampling of the many Monster cards in the box[/caption]

From my games, these can be mixed in with the KoT:O cards if you want even more options.

KoT:MB also comes with two sets of dice, one in black & green and one in orange & black. The orange set was initially included in the King of Tokyo Halloween expansion. There is no difference between these sets of dice. If…

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sequitur (noun): the conclusion of an inference: consequence

Do you consider yourself a wordsmith, a connoisseur of lexicographical delights, a veritable exemplar of sesquipedalian predilection? If reading that sentence really gets your blood flowing, chances are you’ve played a few word games in your time and have relished those experiences. And, if reading that sentence fills you with dread, there’s a good chance that you’ve played a few word games in your time and have left those experiences feeling the exact opposite. Word games tend to reward those of us who are verbose while alienating those of us who just aren’t.

Games should be enjoyable. You should walk away from having played a game with friends feeling uplifted, filled with emotions of friendship and camaraderie, or, at the very least, enlightened. You should not walk away feeling belittled and stupid. All too frequently, at least one person walking away from having just played a word game walks away feeling the latter.

What if I told you that there was a word game that isn’t about the words? What if I told you there was a word game that doesn’t require you to be a walking dictionary? What if I told you that there was a word game where even the smallest words could lead you to victory? Well,…

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I would have told you that Decrypto had been out for way longer than five years. Like Just One, Decrypto arrived in 2018, out of the blue, and immediately established itself as a go-to word game. To think there was a year in which we received Decrypto and Just One. The heart quickens. We had no idea how good we had it.

To celebrate five years of success, Scorpion Masqué has released a 5th anniversary edition, spicing up the classic—board gaming has a short memory—with 440 new words. Does it change the game in any appreciable way? No, this is still very much the Decrypto people know and love. It does freshen things up a bit, though, for those who’ve put their copy of the original release through its paces.

It takes a round or two to get used to Decrypto’s structure, and it’s difficult to describe in absence of the game in front of you. What I’m trying to tell you is, what I describe may not sound fun. I assure you, it is.

The players are divided into two teams, each of which has four secret words that everyone on the team can see. Each round, one player on each team (the “Encryptor”) has a secret three digit code that they need their teammates to guess.…

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I am one of many who have come to know the story of George Méliès through the pencil drawings of Brian Selznick. The Invention of Hugo Cabret is a magnificently illustrated story of belonging and purpose that surrounds the trials and triumphs of the French filmmaker. You can bet it’s a compelling story if it rouses Martin Scorcese to create a three-hour family masterpiece—Hugo sits firmly as my third favorite movie of all time.

Before I knew about the 19xx series of titles from Looping Games, I had marked 1902 Méliès as my most anticipated release at 2023’s SPIEL in Essen. Given my relationship with the subject matter, I never hesitated in wanting to join Méliès here in creating his best known film, A Trip to the Moon. When four games from the series arrived at my door, I set the others aside and opened 1902 like a kid on Christmas. Anticipation always pays off, right?

Imagine my horror when I realized the board wasn’t in the box. I was ready to fire off an email when I thought it best to open the rest of the boxes to see if anything else was lost in the shuffle. Much like my rulebook laugh with 1987 Channel Tunnel, I…

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One of the many advantages of getting intellectual property for your board game is leveraging the audience to look at your project. For example, developing games based on well-known franchises like Marvel or Game of Thrones allows you to tap into those brands' existing fanbases. Fans of the IP are likely to take an interest in a related game, even if just to check it out briefly via marketing materials or initial coverage.

Which leads to my confusion about today’s game, The Last Kingdom. Based on an obscure Netflix show, it only made a blip on my radar due to some YouTube hype around it, calling it a “hidden gem” or “game of the year.” After checking them out and realizing that this is an area control drafting game where you can switch allegiances, I had to see this one to the end.

The Last Kingdom throws you a position of power of the political kind. You are a figure of importance during a time when the Saxons and Danes are having a series of cultural exchanges on the battlefield. Like any other board game, your power in this world is measured through victory points.

Based on that description, one can easily assume that this is a Risk-style or “dudes on a map” board game, and they would be…

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